Trading methods have evolved from a manually intensive process to a technology enabled, electronic platform. With the advent of electronic trading, a user or trader can be in virtually direct contact with the market, from practically anywhere in the world, performing near real-time transactions.
Subscribing traders are connected to an exchange's electronic trading platform by way of a communication link and through an application program interface to facilitate real-time electronic messaging between themselves and the exchanges. The electronic trading platform includes at least one electronic market, which is at the center of the trading system and handles the matching of bids and offers placed by the traders for that market. The electronic messaging includes market information that is distributed from the electronic market to the traders via an electronic data feed. Once the traders receive the market information, it may be displayed to them on their trading screens. Upon viewing the information, traders can take certain actions including the actions of sending buy or sell orders to the electronic market, adjusting existing orders, deleting orders, or otherwise managing orders. Traders may also use software tools on their client devices to automate these and additional actions.
Although the types of market information published by an electronic exchange often differ from market to market, there are generally some standard pieces of information. Market information may include data that represents just the inside market. The inside market is the lowest available ask price (best ask) and the highest available bid price (best bid) in the market for a particular tradeable object at a particular point in time. Market information may also include market depth. Market depth refers to quantities available at the inside market and may also refer to quantities available at other prices away from the inside market. The quantity available at a given price level is usually provided by the exchange in aggregate sums. In other words, an exchange usually provides the total buy quantity and the total sell quantity available in the market at a particular price level in its data feed. In addition to providing order book information, such as price and quantity information, electronic exchanges can offer other types of market information such as the open price, settlement price, net change, volume, last traded price, the last traded quantity, and order fill information.
The extent of market depth available for a trader usually depends on the exchange. For instance, some exchanges provide market depth for all (or most) price levels, and others may provide no market depth at all. Electronic exchanges may also limit the market depth offered as market information can become intensive for network and client devices to process. For instance, an electronic market might offer only five levels of market depth, which includes the quantities available at the current top five buy prices and the quantities available at the current top five sell prices.
Regardless of the extent of data provided by an exchange, the intermediary devices, such as gateways, may become unable to handle the massive processing load and, at least during those times, they cannot maintain near real-time processing. The processing requirements may further increase when a gateway receives data feeds for multiple tradeable objects or at times of high market activity when a gateway is bombarded with a large number of messages for even a single tradeable object. As more traders begin trading in the electronic trading environment, the load on the intermediary devices is expected to increase even further.
Electronic exchanges and/or distributors of market information often struggle to balance the message processing load and the timeliness of market information messages to deliver fast response market data feeds. Most often, traders want access to as much of the information as fast as possible so that they can make more efficient and more effective trades. One example system that assists in processing data at intermediary devices has been described in the commonly assigned patent application Ser. No. 11/551,567, entitled “System and Method for Prioritized Data Delivery in an Electronic Trading Environment,” filed on Oct. 20, 2006, now U.S. Pat. No. 7,747,513. According to one example embodiment in that system, different types of information in a data feed can be associated with different priority levels, and market data associated with a lower priority level can be temporarily stored in a queue, while market data with a higher priority level is sent to a client device.